


Got the world in our hand like a land

by Orokiah



Category: Engelsforstrilogin | The Engelsfors Trilogy - Mats Strandberg & Sara Bergmark Elfgren
Genre: F/F, Happy Ending, Long-Distance Relationship, Post-Canon, Travel, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 05:05:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8877148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orokiah/pseuds/Orokiah
Summary: Magic is the sum of potential, divided by distance. Or, Vanessa and Linnéa take a holiday.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [annemari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/annemari/gifts).



They make a list of places they want to visit. It starts like this:

1\. Japan (Linnéa, for Elias. Vanessa, for Linnéa.)

2\. Ibiza (Vanessa, for the clubs. Linnéa, for Vanessa.)

3\. Australia (both, to test out the surfing.)

4\. The Moon (Vanessa can fly. Why the fuck not?)

 

 

Vanessa has imagined seeing the world in several different ways.

When Nicke turned up, and then never left: she found an old backpack in her wardrobe, and thought briefly about getting the fuck out of there; just up and disappearing.

When she, Michelle and Evelina talked about actually doing it: jumping on a plane and bronzing on a beach in Ibiza, no boys invited. Until they sobered up, of course, and discovered they could barely afford a bus ticket between them.

When she met Wille: Thailand, this time, just the two of them. In a universe where he had a job, didn't lie and cheat, and Vanessa wasn't too busy saving the world to see it.

When she thought about the person in whose company she wanted to discover it, and spend her life with too, all the way to the end.

She never, not once, expected to do it in the company of her former high school principal.

 

 

They don't start off with the world. They start slow, the way important things always do. Every snowball starts off small, before it gathers the pace it needs, and turns into an avalanche.

They drive past the borders of Engelsfors, forest turning to bonsai in the rearview mirror. Vanessa always swore that when she left, it would be without looking back, but she was wrong. She turns and looks until the frame holds nothing familiar; the thrill of it tempered by the things she's left behind. The road stretches, and she is reborn once again, blinking new eyes at everything that lies ahead. On to Stockholm—a daring recce to the very doorstep of the Council—and then further, further, always further. It's a big, wide world, and there are a lot of witches in it.

The tide of magic is rising: expanding with Vanessa's horizons.

The Northern Lights, shimmering above the slopes of Geysir, prompting Vanessa to dream that it's another portent, and wake clutching air on the empty side of her bed. The still waters of Venice, reflecting the stars. The golden crowns of Amsterdam's tulips, rising triumphant at dawn, and seeming to whisper: _The night is over. And we survived_.

Adriana is not bad company, really. But there's still only one person she wants to see it all with.

She asks for two straws in her smoothie in Berlin, and changes the order to mulled wine, since she can drink what she likes, when she's alone—even if it's generally a bad fucking idea, to be both lonely and drunk in alien surroundings. She buys an armful of black fabric from a stall in Marrakesh, although the shipping costs more than the roll. She looks at postcards everywhere, imagining where they'd sit on Linnéa's old wall. They are snapshots of scenery, and sentiment. She knows now, bone-deep, why people send them, instead of talking by text, or online.

So little can say so much, sometimes, and stand for even more.

 

 

_I'm here._

_(You're there.)_

_I believe in this._

_(I believe in us.)_

_I'm happy._

_(But I'm happiest of all, when I'm thinking of you.)_

 

 

She pours maple syrup on her pancakes at an American diner, somewhere that is very far from America. She watches it pool in soft cream dimples, and pictures it instead, sparkling and spreading on skin.

That tempting hint of sweetness, hidden by salt.

 

 

Vanessa is, in essence, a witch hunter; a phrase reclaimed, reshaped as benign, instead of evoking burning stakes, and the memory of smoke. But she isn't only recruiting new witches, or helping Adriana track reports of strange phenomena, which often lead to them.

Vanessa has a secret side-mission, too.

It's not officially a mission, though Adriana has trained her, in word and deed, to think of their travels that way. More a matter of practicalities: the Council being far ahead of them in facts and figures, as well as personnel, and influence, and reach. It's not, really, a secret at all: more an unspoken agreement among the remaining Chosen Ones.

The world is magical now, becoming more so with each day that passes. Engelsfors is no longer the only battery Vanessa requires to charge herself. Still she feels her magic ebbing and flowing with the miles; peaking with proximity to home, and falling away, the closer she is to the equator. It spikes in areas that remain magical hotspots—like Ibiza, where Vanessa has not yet managed to go. She notes these places down, comparing against Adriana's Council-derived data, more aware than ever of the gulf between them.

The Chosen Ones were tied so tightly to Engelsfors, the source of their power, and the place they were strongest. Their magic was the sum of potential, multiplied by time, divided by distance. Everything is different, now, but the equation remains the same.

How far can they go? How fast is it changing? And without an army of scientists and labs at their disposal, how can Adriana's council—another word reclaimed—ever hope to quantify it?

Minoo is both the answer to these questions, and the mission. The Chosen Ones are hoping it will help her, provide her with fresh purpose, to have a task that is uniquely her own: even if she doesn't yet know it.

Minoo may no longer be the world's most powerful witch, but she still has her big, brilliant brain.

 

 

Vanessa never makes the mistake of forgetting why she's out here, far from the only world she's ever known. Wanderlust is woven through her soul, an itch she is only beginning to scratch. She has free time, chances to explore, but still. This is a job—a calling—and not a vacation.

Until the day Adriana catches her, flicking despondently through photos on her phone, instead of cataloguing brand new witches.

Over dinner that night, she says: “We've been working very hard, Vanessa, lately. I think we've both earned a holiday.”

They're in Paris at the time. European home of the Council, universal home of something it knows nothing about. Vanessa has been too busy to see much of it. She has barely registered it, in fact: _Eiffel Tower nice. Seine pretty_.

Vanessa calls Linnéa. Linnéa answers, in seconds, because she knew it was coming, because she's been waiting.

“It's not Air Vanessa,” Vanessa says. “But Adriana might be willing to stretch to business class.”

She can feel the amusement on Linnéa's cynical lips, even before it blossoms from them.

 

 

Vanessa spends a lot of time in the air, these days. She's either on planes or waiting for them, or being the witch equivalent: she's in her element, so to speak. She's become something of a student of flying, as a result.

It's like cramming for her pilot licence, when she is vehicle and navigator both. Her body may respond to air currents, but Vanessa has an instinctive suspicion, now, of being led by forces she doesn't understand. It's a suspicion borrowed from Linnéa, or shared, or maybe the natural hangover of discovering that the guardians were lying to them, every step of the way.

Minoo seems suspicious, too, when Vanessa quizzes her on certain aspects of atmosphere, and pressure. She is well aware that Vanessa has a perfectly big brain of her own, and is more than capable of using it.

It's impossible for her not to realise what is happening. Vanessa expects it seems patronising, from her perspective. She already knows what she will say, if Minoo points this out: that it's not about pity, or even sympathy. It's about helping a friend to play to her strengths.

To remember that she has them in abundance, even when she feels so very, very powerless.

But Minoo says nothing. And as it happens, none of the information she unearths is as useful as her advice. Vanessa's flying is a force of nature, she reasons. It's not something to be over-thought. It's more like a bird, than a plane.

“Magic is your fuel,” Minoo says, and sounds only a little wistful when she adds, “So let it be magical.”

 

 

Up until now, Linnéa has stayed in Engelsfors. She made the necessary applications, after they sat counting stars on the shore of Dammsjön Lake, dreaming up their list, but her wanderlust has always been less specific than Vanessa's: simply a desire to escape her demons, every monster who wished her harm.

Vanessa has embraced finding witches with easy, eager enthusiasm. Linnéa remains in chrysalis, her role in the war of two councils still undefined. It's a void of purpose she is keenly aware of but avoids articulating, knowing that Vanessa can feel it too, as if they shared the same skin.

For now, she confines herself to practicalities. There are court damages to claw from the abyss of their year-long absence; a permanent home to find. She can't stay with Vanessa's mum forever, she says, much as Melvin—and Vanessa—would like her to. There is the painstaking building, brick by gossamer brick, of a relationship with her father. And at Minoo's suggestion—one post-purpose Chosen One, understanding another—she is curating an exhibition, soliciting contributions. Engelsforsers' responses to chaos, cults, and a dying town gone global as Capital of Weird.

Never was artistic therapy more necessary.

Vanessa gives Linnéa the space she needs to do this. She loves that Linnéa gives her space, in exchange. She supports her in roaming the world, as and when she's required to, safe now in the knowledge that however far Vanessa flies, there is one place she will always return to.

“And anyway,” Linnéa told her, the night before she left for the first time, “I don't know if I'm so interested in flying, as you are.”

Vanessa knows she meant within metal skin, and not the embrace of her arms. She knows, too, that she is asking so much: Linnéa has never had the opportunity to fly before, at least not the traditional way. There is fear in the unknown, the way there is in moving forward, to a future unwritten. For Linnéa, moving on has so often meant exchanging one horror story, one tormentor, for another. Fear infects; finds new weak spots to probe, when at risk of banishment.

Vanessa's oldest fear was to be stuck in Engelsfors, stranded there forever. It feels strange, now: to be away from it, and to miss it, as if some intrinsic part of her were missing too. One fear extinguished, and another born. Is Linnéa giving her space a sign that she is falling into old habits, and pushing her away? She worries, alone in hotel rooms, that space is really little more than distance. Without a distinct shared goal, what's to stop them drifting further and further apart, new life the jet stream that carries them in different directions?

And then she's in Rome. At a bar, bathed in neon, sipping a watermelon cocktail that's far more water than melon. It's ice-cold, but the shiver that seizes her is warm. She is suddenly certain that Linnéa is nursing a drink of her own: a hot one, steam tickling her nose. She has cosy toes, while Vanessa is courting frostbite in strappy sandals, and getting ripped off too, to add insult to injury. They are simultaneously pissed off and tickled by it, together, as one.

Magic varies with mileage, but their bond endures.

 

 

A blue tit perches on her windowsill, while she's unpacking woolly jumpers from three days in Brussels, hunting out bikinis for a week in the south of France. It sits still, as if waiting for Vanessa to notice it; fluffs its yellow breast when she does.

The bright black eyes regard her with an intensity that makes her wonder if it's any old blue tit, or one in particular. One looks much like the twin of another—but maybe this is Viktor's, returned. One half of a whole, forced to be separate.

Vanessa has no idea what it feels like, when the bond of witch and familiar is severed. She has never got round to asking Adriana, in any moment of in-flight small talk, or professional discourse. The smallest mention of Adriana's raven makes Anna-Karin's eyes fill with tears; sends her fingers to the scar from her fox, assuring herself that both of them remain.

The little bird is a lonely sight. Or perhaps Vanessa is projecting. Maybe it's her imagination, knowing that Viktor is dead, and knowing now how he felt about her. But there's something longing about the way it looks at her. It would be far from the strangest thing to happen, that a bird should fall in love with her.

Linnéa says animals don't think the way humans do. Her girlfriend is the authority on such things, and so Vanessa believes her—but often she thinks of Frasse, who was so much a part of their family, far more loyal than Nicke; who loved her mum enough to defend her with the last breath in his body.

“You aren't the only one he left behind,” she tells the bird. It feels fucking ridiculous, but she presses on. “There is another.”

Melvin kicks a ball against Vanessa's door, quite possibly with his mind and not his feet, making her start. When she looks again, the blue tit is gone.

She hopes it has flown to Clara. That they can find some solace in each other. That it will find a way to understand, just as Vanessa is trying to.

 

 

She gets a text from Mona while she's watching Linnéa's flight on an app, a dotted line from Sweden, leading straight to her heart.

 _What did your mother tell you about practical shoes?_ it reads.

 _Nothing_ , Vanessa thinks, confused.

It starts raining as she steps out of the taxi. Vanessa's thigh-high, faux leather boots start leaking at the exact same time.

She squints up at the sky, criss-crossed by chemtrails, entwined like lifelines. Below them, Charles de Gaulle glimmers in the fading light, limned with promise.

_Fucking Mona._

 

 

“If you could pick any animal as a familiar,” she whispers, nested in a cocoon of warm sheets at her hotel, exploring every familiar part of Linnéa as if it were new—in case something has changed, while they've been apart—“what would it be?”

She feels with her fingertips how Linnéa's brow creases at the question; feels with her whole being how a sarcastic response is always first to spring to mind. Defence mechanisms are built over time, a skin not easily shed.

“An angry bee,” Linnéa says.

Vanessa sees the black-and-gold striped socks, discarded on the carpet, peeled from Linnéa's calves like sweet, fresh fruit. She tweaks Linnéa's nose in playful rebuke. Strokes along her collarbone, feeling its sharp, unyielding edge. It makes her think of the armadillo she saw at Parken Zoo: a fuckton of armour, the underside so tender.

Fuck, she's drunk. No jet lag to blame it on, this time. Just a glass of French _vin_ , and the heady closeness of her girl.

“They'll do a Buzzfeed quiz one day,” Vanessa says with a giggle. “ _What element are you, really? We can guess what your familiar is from these_ _six_ _simple questions..._ ”

Linnéa giggles back, until she doesn't. “A bee would be interesting, actually,” she says. “Or anything that can fly. I would like to feel what it's like—if it's the same for them as it is for you.”

“How about a bat?”

“Bats are very misunderstood,” Linnéa says sternly. “Decades of vampire lore, and bad horror movies.”

“A bit like witches,” Vanessa says, thinking of the horror on the face of the wood witch they found in Dublin. She accidentally mutated her cacti, and thought the Triffids had invaded. Vanessa is convinced the witch would take her chances with a Triffid over possessing magical powers, given the choice.

“What would you pick?” Linnéa asks.

Vanessa thinks of Frasse. It hurts, so she thinks of the lonely blue tit, and long afternoons spent in Storvall Park, talking and fighting, and falling in love.

“A pigeon,” she says.

Linnéa screws up her beautiful face.

“They're misunderstood, too. They fight among themselves, but they still work together. They're not easily scared, and they don't give up. They survive, no matter what.”

“They live off crumbs,” Linnéa says, and maybe it's because Vanessa is tipsy, but it sounds a lot like them, and where they're at right now.

“They know where they're going,” Vanessa concludes, “which is more than you can say for me.”

Linnéa grins. She takes hold of Vanessa's hand, and guides it down, down, down.

Paris comes to life, right outside the window, a million miles away.

 

 

They visit the Louvre, because Linnéa is an artist, and because they're tourists, and that's what tourists do. At their age it's free, which avoids a dilemma Vanessa has become accustomed to, on her travels. Using her power to dodge fees is something she's considered, but always decided against. Abusing one's magical abilities is an easy trap to fall into, if unguarded against. It takes work, just like relationships. It's not enough to be good, any more than it is to be in love.

Outside, they sit in a patch of pale sunlight and share a stale packet of wafers from Vanessa's coat pocket, while Linnéa smokes a cigarette. Quitting is a journey in itself, however strong the desire. Vanessa is about to suggest lunch—consisting entirely of macarons—but Linnéa is positively vibrating, an energy she identifies as creation.

The great works of art have inspired her. An odyssey of beauty and sadness, horror and joy: leaving them here, on the other side.

Linnéa takes a small black book from her bag, and leaves it open, upside down, between them. Vanessa glances at it, as she hunts for a pencil. Something about it holds her attention. It haunts some hidden part of her, the way the _Mona Lisa_ did. She picks up the book, fingers ghosting across its cover, and the symbol stamped there.

Linnéa feels her reaction before she hears it, fringe flicking up as her head whips around.

“This is a Book of Patterns,” Vanessa says.

“ _Was_ ,” Linnéa corrects.

She takes it from Vanessa, and opens it up, extending it almost timidly. On the page is a silhouette that is recognisably Vanessa, on a vaguely-sketched background. It's made with love, clearly. It's also, on closer inspection, made from elemental symbols, cunningly arranged and shaded.

“You've turned the Book of Patterns into a _colouring book_?”

Linnéa recoils, stung. “The pages are blank now,” she says. She stubs out her cigarette, so carefully calm. “All I've done is repurpose it.”

“Like you're what, fucking Banksy? Don't you think that's wrong? Sort of...sacrilegious?”

Linnéa stares at Vanessa as if she's a total stranger, and not the love of her life. That stings, too. Hurt and confusion flash back and forth between them, magnifying like sunlight through a lens.

Linnéa slams shut the book. She is sitting next to Vanessa, but she might as well be back in Engelsfors. So very near, yet still so very far.

 

 

They take the Eurostar to London, because it was number five on the list, and Vanessa had booked tickets, as a surprise.

The atmosphere is frosty. The night air is chill.

Linnéa closes her eyes as they pull into the Channel Tunnel. Vanessa wonders if she's feeling the weight of icy water, above, and all around them.

 

 

“And how would you rate your invisibility?” asks Minoo. “On a scale from one to ten.”

She is sitting on her bed—or possibly Gustaf's—but the image on Vanessa's phone tells her so much more. Minoo is poised with a clipboard, scientist-precise, as if she were in a laboratory, uniformed in white. But there's curiosity in her stance, a warmth in her eyes that always went away when she used the guardians' magic; that distant, icy indifference as she examined auras, and weighed up probabilities.

The questions have become more detailed, increasingly involved, over time. It fills her with hope. Minoo can't help but invest in the task, perform it to her fullest. Much more of the old Minoo is left than she seemed able to believe, at the start.

Vanessa flexes her fingers and experimentally releases her power. In Engelsfors she can now concentrate on individual parts of her body, and hide them from view. It's not the most useful of skills, for sure, but it makes a great party trick.

This far from Engelsfors, things feel different. Her magic has slowed, like a lazy muscle. She can float in the air just fine, and even disappear: but there's a smudge in the bathroom mirror, like the afterimage on a screen, when she turns her head. It takes extra effort to achieve what had become as natural as breathing.

“Six and a half,” she says.

Minoo's frown would be audible, even if she couldn't see it. “Whole numbers only, please, Vanessa.”

“Okay, seven then, I guess.”

She draws back the power, tapping her fingernails on the sink. It's cold marble, veined with cracks. It reminds her of Linnéa's china panther. Linnéa, who is in their bedroom, napping, or maybe doing what Vanessa is doing. Testing out her magic, and trying to figure out how their first holiday together turned into this.

Yet another battle.

“Is everything okay?” Minoo asks. It's a question that is definitely not on her clipboard, and Vanessa feels a rush of affection to hear it.

“How far are we from Engelsfors, exactly?”

There's a pause while Minoo looks it up. Vanessa could do it herself, of course.

But neither of them mentions that.

“One thousand, eight hundred and ninety-three kilometres. Which is one thousand, one hundred and seventy-six English miles.”

“Which are you using in your spreadsheet?”

“Both,” Minoo says. “For completeness.”

The mention of kilometres and miles makes Vanessa think about units that are not of distance. They will need one to gauge magical strength, eventually. If the Council can measure potential from a strand of hair, they must have a word for the findings. No doubt something in Latin, the meaning behind it forgotten.

Perhaps Adriana's council could name theirs after Minoo, instead. Minoo, who was strong enough to save the world; seems slowly to be realising that strength does not always have to be magical, to make a difference.

“You sound like you're right next door,” Vanessa says, because technology sometimes seems like magic, too. She wonders aloud how long it would take her to fly home, since that part seems less affected than the rest.

“What's your maximum speed?”

“I've never measured it.”

“We'll get to that,” Minoo assures her.

Vanessa has no doubt at all that it's true.

 

 

Maybe she is better at navigating than she thinks. Up in the air, it's about wind speed and magnetic currents. In London, there's a colourful map.

The frostiness is still there as they explore, choosing once again the typical tourist things: Buckingham Palace, Oxford Street, the British Museum. Vanessa doesn't need her power to feel invisible, in a city so teeming with life. But she feels most at home when they reach the top of the London Eye, walking on air once more, near enough to clouds that it seems they could touch them. Her magic swims to the surface, trying to keep her there. Her hand reaches for Linnéa's, wanting to share the experience.

In the end, she retracts them both.

If the London sky feels like home, then the shops they find, somewhere near Covent Garden, resemble it even more. They walk into one that could be the Crystal Cave, in either incarnation, transported. It's wall to wall potions, tarot cards and candles. Vanessa has the distinct impression there might also be some ectoplasm, hidden in the back.

It feels like a witch's den, masquerading as a tourist trap. There are no telltale signs of Council activity, but plenty of tacky souvenirs: mugs and keyrings and an array of postcards, pointy hats and wands displayed without comment among them.

Linnéa spends a long time sifting through the postcards, finally buying one that says, in English: _I'll stop wearing black when they invent a darker colour_. Vanessa buys a topaz crystal for her mum, and as she pays, deliberately catches the palm of the young woman behind the counter.

Static sparks, making both of them wince. Vanessa files away her assessment, for a future visit. The woman fetches her change and says, “Don't get your lovely hair wet now, will you?”

It can't be going to rain. It's the warmest day of the year so far; Vanessa knows this because it's made the front page of almost every newspaper. Are all metal witches as cryptic and annoying as Mona? She wonders if Ida would also have started predicting the weather, if she'd lived. The thought makes her smile. Ida on TV, pointing impatiently at a map, saying, _“It's going to rain again tomorrow, okay? Which is totally, like, so not fair.”_

She looks over, in time to see that Linnéa is smiling, too.

 

 

Mona said: _“It'll be no picnic.”_   She said: _“These two lines are intertwined, all the way to the end.”_

She didn't say: _“You'll never have to fight for anything,_ about _anything, ever again.”_

Vanessa could start a blog on Shit Mona Says. Mona would probably love it—the part where the Council has them assassinated, not so much—and finagle a book deal and talk show out of it, as well.

Vanessa doesn't need her future told, these days, to know where it lies. But there are still things she wants answers to, that even Mona can't provide.

Why does Linnéa making art from a lie bother her so fucking much?

How can she turn invisible, and not give her own feelings the same transparency?

And why, when she's away so often these days that it's practically a long-distance relationship, is she not making the most of every precious second they have together?

Vanessa remembers Mona's prediction, and decides, for once, to prove her wrong.

 _Carpe diem_ , as Nicolaus might have said.

Seize the day.

 

 

It's after dark, on the top of Primrose Hill. This high, there's almost a bird's eye view of London, glittering before them in the velvet span of night. They are not alone, but that matters little, in most capital cities—busy, crowded, indifferent—and least of all in this one.

Vanessa would love nothing more than to lay on a feast. But travel is expensive, and her salary is cheap. She brings a blanket, borrowed from their bed, and some tiny candles that promptly gutter to wisps, forcing her to rely on moonlight, and phones. She carefully arranges her wares, purchased from the reduced shelf of a supermarket while Linnéa was in the shower: pasta salad, sandwiches sweating in plastic, a stack of salted crisps. Dessert is a bag of grapes, wrinkled like wet fingers.

The wine she left behind. She settled for Coke, and sober conversation, instead.

“I am so fucking useless at this,” she says, as they sit in silence, surveying their meal. The wind whistles its judgement around them. She opens the Coke, jumping as it spurts out like a geyser, soaking her hair with fizz. She can practically hear Mona cackling, back in Engelsfors. Fucking metal witches, always having to be right.

“ _Shit_. It was supposed to be all spontaneous, and romantic...”

“It is romantic,” Linnéa says. She shifts, making a visible effort, even in limited light, to scale back the armour. She swallows, and says, “I'm sorry, you know...if I upset you.”

“ _You_ didn't,” Vanessa says, still not sure why it had upset her at all, or came out as it did. And then it comes to her, in a blinding flash of insight. The way it did when she realised she was in love with Linnéa, and had been all along, falling so slowly she was caught before she knew it.

“I guess it's the book. The guardians cheated, you know? They lied to us. They tricked us. It's always worse, afterwards, when you're dumb enough to believe them.”

Linnéa squeezes her hand. Linnéa, who is not a liar, or a cheat. Linnéa, who is there for Vanessa, and Vanessa for her, wherever in the world they are, and whatever the distance between them.

“It meant something. It really stood for something. And I know it's not—like—the Bible, or whatever—”

“But it _was_ our bible,” Linnéa says. Vanessa feels her anger: the white-hot fury, roaring through her veins, given such unapologetic expression. She squeezes back, wanting to preserve this moment, as if in amber, the way some part of her was trying to do with the book.

Keep it as a monument to the friends it led so trustingly to their ends; to everything it should have been, and wasn't. To a world that is forever altered, in consequence.

“I'm proud of you,” Vanessa says. “You took their lies, and made them beautiful.” She adds, “I'm sorry, too. I didn't mean to upset you.”

“I was more pissed off,” Linnéa says, no sugarcoating it, ever. “I flew out here to see you, even though I was fucking scared to death, and then you threw a fit at me, and compared me to Banksy.”

“You're so much better...”

Linnéa looks sceptical. “And I was nervous, too. Because I so wanted you to see the picture...even though I hadn't finished it.”

She takes out the book and flips it open; holds a phone light over Vanessa so it spreads around her, an aura.

The drawing is complete. The space behind Vanessa is now a wall, filled with items from Linnéa's old apartment. Posters and pictures, wooden cross, panther peeking into frame. Mingled among them, a perfect blend, are things not from the apartment at all. The flowers on the paper are gerberas. There is a shelf of slasher movies and Stephen King novels, titles printed in tiny type. Beneath is a picture Vanessa recognises as a miniature of one drawn for her by Melvin: stick figures of her and Linnéa, holding hands, with happy, smiling faces.

“I found an apartment,” Linnéa says. “And I thought—I was hoping—that when you got home—”

Vanessa's answer is a kiss. Her hands tangle through Linnéa's hair. Linnéa tilts her head, an automatic response, finding the angle that suits them both. When they finally part, Vanessa realises that her hands smell of coconut. She knows, without needing to ask, that Linnéa has taken a liking to her mum's shampoo, too. Has borrowed it from their hotel room, and also at home, when Vanessa is away, to make the sheets smell of her; an invisible presence, always, forever.

She will miss her mum and Melvin, of course, but they will be close by. She can't wait for them to have a space that is just for the two of them. Perhaps three, eventually, with a dog, or—the panther being a portent of its own—a cat.

The witch scored two for the price of one, about her hair. The rain begins, slender needles, swirling in the breeze with a stormy passion.

Vanessa didn't bring an umbrella. But she has Linnéa, who wrinkles up her nose and concentrates. Vanessa lends a hand, letting the magic flow between them. The water parts above them, all around them, as if they were sitting at the heart of a bell jar.

In a world of their own.

 

 

Linnéa bought another postcard too, in the magic gift shop. It translates as: _To the Moon and back_. Vanessa knows exactly where she will put it.

They have yet to visit Japan, and Ibiza, and all the rest of it. But they choose, for now, to settle for Engelsfors.

The rest of the world will still be waiting. And Vanessa, much as she loves travelling, wants to go home.

 

 

They cancel the plane tickets.

Vanessa can fly. Why the fuck not?

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from 'Got Love' by Tove Lo.


End file.
